New carbon nanotube sheets claim world’s top heat-sink performance Fujitsu Laboratories announced last week they have developed a process to manufacture sheets of pure carbon, multi-walled perpendicular nanotubes (CNTs). The uniformly arrayed tubes are aligned in the direction of heat removal so that they can be used as heat sinks for a number of electronic applications including silicon carbide devices employed in electric vehicles and in high-performance computing. IEEE Spectrum

Sources: Apple is acquiring music recognition app Shazam As Spotify continues to inch towards a public listing, Apple is making a move of its own to step up its game in music services. Sources tell us that the company is close to acquiring Shazam, the popular app that lets people identify any song, TV show, film or advert in seconds, by listening to an audio clip or (in the case of, say, an ad) a visual fragment, and then takes you to content relevant to that search. TechCrunch

Inside the mechanics of building 8,000lb human-controlled robo-athletes If Jonathan Tippett had his way, the Olympics of the future would showcase more than mere humans—he foresees human-powered robot athletes, too. And at a Toronto tech event this July, the Canadian mechanical engineer asked us to imagine racing events where pilots would embed themselves in massive exo-bionic mechs. Ars Technica

Another defeat of the Intel management engine If you have a computer with an Intel processor that’s newer than about 2007, odds are high that it also contains a mystery software package known as the Intel Management Engine (ME). The ME has complete access to the computer below the operating system and can access a network, the computer’s memory, and many other parts of the computer even when the computer is powered down. Hackaday

Bitcoin is none of the things it was supposed to be On Thursday, the price of Bitcoin fluctuated by thousands of dollars in a 24-hour period. The Coinbase app — which lets you buy and sell cryptocurrencies, and is the number two free app in the App Store as of this writing — started freezing and throwing errors, which the company said was due to high traffic. The Outline (also, The Bitcoin Whales: 1,000 People Who Own 40 Percent of the Market)

Quantum computing explained In 1982, a scientific paper - 'Simulating Physics with Computers' written by the famous physicist Richard P. Feynman was published. In his paper, Feynman had pointed out that there seemed to be essential difficulties in simulating quantum mechanical systems on classical computers, and suggested that building computers based on the principles of quantum mechanics would allow us to avoid those difficulties. Clerro.com

Vestri the robot imagines how to perform tasks UC Berkeley researchers have developed a robotic learning technology that enables robots to imagine the future of their actions so they can figure out how to manipulate objects they have never encountered before. In the future, this technology could help self-driving cars anticipate future events on the road and produce more intelligent robotic assistants in homes, but the initial prototype focuses on learning simple manual skills entirely from autonomous play. Berkeley on YouTube

Using artiﬁcial intelligence to augment human intelligence Historically, different answers to this question – that is, different visions of computing – have helped inspire and determine the computing systems humanity has ultimately built. Consider the early electronic computers. ENIAC, the world’s ﬁrst general-purpose electronic computer, was commissioned to compute artillery ﬁring tables for the United States Army. Distill.pub

Inside Baidu’s bid to lead the AI revolution Presumably, Robin Li wanted attention last summer when he decided to launch Baidu’s bid for the future of self-driving cars from the front seat of a car that was driving itself. He wanted to draw attention to Apollo, the company’s new set of artificial intelligence-driven tools, which Li hopes will come to power vehicles everywhere. Wired

I made my shed the top rated restaurant on TripAdvisor Once upon a time, long before I began selling my face by the acre for features on VICE dot com, I worked other jobs. There was one in particular that really had an impact on me: writing fake reviews on TripAdvisor. Restaurant owners would pay me £10 and I'd write a positive review of their place, despite never eating there. Vice

New 3-D printer is 10 times faster than commercial counterparts MIT engineers have developed a new desktop 3-D printer that performs up to 10 times faster than existing commercial counterparts. Whereas the most common printers may fabricate a few Lego-sized bricks in one hour, the new design can print similarly sized objects in just a few minutes. MIT

Ubuntu 17.10: Return of the GNOME If you've been following the Linux world at all, you know this has been an entire year for spring cleaning. Early in 2017, Canonical stopped work on its homegrown Unity desktop, Mir display server, and its larger vision of "convergence"—a unified interface for Ubuntu for phones, tablets, and desktops. Ars Technica

New nanowires are just a few atoms thick “Two-dimensional materials” — materials deposited in layers that are only a few atoms thick — are promising for both high-performance electronics and flexible, transparent electronics that could be layered onto physical surfaces to make computing ubiquitous. MIT

The decentralized web primer This primer contains a series of Tutorials explaining IPFS, Merkle Trees and the Decentralized Web. It's written and maintained as a gitbook so people can read it in many formats. Gitbook